Congratulations to all of 2023-2024 MSc students graduating in January 2025.

The department would also like recognise the winners of the following MSc prizes:

Best Overall Data Analytics student: Pak Ho Gordon Sy

Best Overall Computer Science student: Olly Wortley

Best Data Analytics dissertation: Tianyi Huang

Best Computer Science dissertation: Olly Wortley

iGEM is a global synthetic biology competition that involves more than 400 teams worldwide.

The University of Warwick iGEM team 2024 – team BEACON – took part in the iGEM competition, which culminated with the iGEM Jamboree in Paris, at the end of October. We would like to congratulate Aaron Lee (CSE) for their fantastic work on the project within the team including 9 other UG students from various departments, including Life Sciences, Chemistry, Engineering and Mathematics. For their interdisciplinary project, they addressed the need for developing better ways to recycle lanthanides, such as the ones found in electronic devices. They engineered bacteria to scavenge for lanthanide ions and swim towards a point for collection through an engineered chemotactic system. Team BEACON were awarded a Gold medal (grade) at the Jamboree, in recognition of their success during the project.

Six papers co-authored by DIMAP and Theory and Foundations researchers were presented earlier in July at ICALP 2024, the 51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming:

• Rohan Acharya, Marcin Jurdzinski, Aditya Prakash: Lookahead Games and Efficient Determinisation of History-Deterministic Büchi Automata,
• Dmitry Chistikov, Alessio Mansutti, Mikhail R. Starchak: Integer Linear-Exponential Programming in NP by Quantifier Elimination,
• Artur Czumaj, Guichen Gao, Shaofeng H.-C. Jiang, Robert Krauthgamer, Pavel Veselý: Fully-Scalable MPC Algorithms for Clustering in High Dimension,
• Argyrios Deligkas, Eduard Eiben, Robert Ganian, Iyad Kanj, M. S. Ramanujan: Parameterized Algorithms for Coordinated Motion Planning: Minimizing Energy,
• Julian Dörfler, Christian Ikenmeyer: Functional Closure Properties of Finite ℕ-Weighted Automata,
• Zhenjian Lu, Rahul Santhanam: Impagliazzo's Worlds Through the Lens of Conditional Kolmogorov Complexity.

ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS). This year's ICALP took place in Tallinn, Estonia, on the 8th to 12th of July 2024.

Dmitry's paper "Integer Linear-Exponential Programming in NP by Quantifier Elimination" won the Best Paper Award of ICALP's Track B, which is a flagship research meeting on Automata, Logic, Semantics, and Theory of Programming. The paper studies the following problem: given a system of linear equations and constraints of the form y=2^x, does it have a solution over the natural numbers? By using and extending a method that generalises Gaussian elimination, Dmitry and his co-authors Alessio Mansutti and Mikhail Starchak show that the problem belongs to the complexity class NP. This result provides a way to efficiently certify the existence of a solution, even if all solutions are very big (towers of exponentials).

This is the second time in a row that this award goes to a Warwick paper: Henry Sinclair-Banks, a DIMAP PhD student, was an awardee in 2023.

We are happy to announce that Dr Florin Ciucu (CS), Dr Long Tran-Thanh (CS) and Dr Paul Jenkins (Statistics and CS) have been promoted to Professor, effective 1st August 2024.

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!

The Department of Computer Science celebrated the end of the academic year with a staff BBQ, along with some games of rounders and a tug of war.

Thank you everyone for your hard work this year!

A recent paperLink opens in a new window published by Dr. Ian MertzLink opens in a new window, a postdoctoral researcher in the Theory and Foundations (FoCS)Link opens in a new window research group and the Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications (DIMAP)Link opens in a new window, has disproved a longstanding conjecture on the limitations of space-bounded computation.

For many years it had been believed that a function, known as Tree Evaluation, would be the key to separating two fundamental classes of problems: those computable quickly (P), and those computable in low space (L). Mertz, along with James CookLink opens in a new window of Toronto, builds on their earlier work to show a low-space algorithm for Tree Evaluation, thus refuting this belief. In particular, their technique has attracted attention for shedding new light on the power of space-bounded computation, suggesting novel approaches to age-old questions in complexity theory. They show that space can be used in surprising ways, with the same memory serving many simultaneous purposes.

The paper, which Mertz will present at the 56th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC 2024)Link opens in a new window, has been invited to the special issue of SIAM Journal on Computing (SICOMP)Link opens in a new window for the conference. STOC is the main conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and one of the two premier venues for theoretical computer science, with only the top results being invited for publication in the special issue.

Mertz has also presented this work at many venues, including the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Columbia University, Oxford University, Warwick (Online Complexity Seminar)Link opens in a new window, McGill University, and others.

We are happy to announce two recent promotions in the department effective from 1 August 2024:

• Dr Amina Asif has been promoted to Assistant Professor
• Dr Andrew Hague has been promoted to Associate Professor

Many congratulations to our colleagues for their achievements!